Can I Use My TV Dish For Satellite Internet?
It makes sense to wonder if you could simply add satellite Internet service through your existing satellite dish. However, the type of dish used for satellite television reception is different than what is required for Internet access. High Speed Internet via satellite must be two-way, while a satellite TV dish will only perform one-way.
The satellite dish used for television looks similar to a satellite Internet dish, but there are major differences. The primary difference is that the television dish is almost always one-way only.
This means that information can only be received by this kind of dish, not transmitted. In early satellite Internet services this type of dish was used, and all outgoing information was sent via a telephone line. This meant that a user would have fast downloads, but uploading was the same speed as dial up. This type of service is still in use, but is very rare.
The modern home use satellite Internet dish is a two-way hardware device that transmits and receives radio carrier waves of data to either a way station or a satellite and cannot be used for other purposes.